New Books in Journalism

Who were your heroes during your formative years? As a child of the 1970s, many of mine were journalists, especially those reporting on war and revolution in Southeast Asia and Latin America. I wanted to be Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously, James Woods in Salvador, or even Nick Nolte in Under Fire. It was all so exciting and glamorous, but all of these role models were men. As a teenag...

On June 4, Federal Police raided the home of Walkley award-winning journalist Annika Smethurst, changing her life forever. The police claimed they were investigating the publication of classified information, her employer called it a 'dangerous act of intimidation'. Annika believes she was simply doing her job. Ms Smethurst became the accidental poster woman for press freedom. Politicians even deb...

Can your zip code predict when you will die? Should you space out childhood vaccines? Does talcum powder cause cancer? Why do some doctors recommend e-cigarettes while other doctors recommend you stay away from them? Health information―and misinformation―is all around us, and it can be hard to separate the two. A long history of unethical medical experiments and medical mistakes, along with a host...

We are joined today by Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa in the writers’ heaven that is Iowa City, Iowa. She also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Gender, Women’s Studies, and Sexuality Studies at Iowa. She is here today to talk to us about her upcoming book: Me Too: The Impact of Rape Culture in the Media (P...

On January 28 2011 WikiLeaks released documents from a cache of US State Department cables stolen the previous year. The Daily Telegraph in London published one of the memos with an article headlined 'Egypt protests: America's secret backing for rebel leaders behind uprising'. The effect of the revelation was immediate, helping set in motion an aggressive counter-narrative to the nascent story of...

We are just over a year from when global news first reported a new type of pneumonia emerging in the Chinese city of Wuhan. A lockdown of Wuhan on January 23rd, 2020, was the first indication that these stories were more serious than originally thought. All of us know what happened next: COVID-19 spread from China to other countries in Asia, then to Europe, then to North America, then worldwide. T...

In the early decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of Yiddish speaking immigrants actively participated in the American Socialist and labor movement. They formed the milieu of the hugely successful daily Forverts (Forward), established in New York in April 1897.  In Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth...

In Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico (Duke University Press, 2020), Vanessa Freije develops a new rich thesis about the role of the press in Mexican civil society. In this well researched monograph, Freije shows how journalists played a key role in producing scandalous spectacles that brought an otherwise authoritarian PRI to account. Simultaneously,...

For nearly eighty years, a huge portion of coastal South Africa was closed off to the public. With many of its pits now deemed “overmined” and abandoned, American journalist Matthew Gavin Frank sets out across the infamous Diamond Coast to investigate an illicit trade that supplies a global market. Immediately, he became intrigued by the ingenious methods used in facilitating smuggling?particularl...

A reporter uncovers the secrets behind the scientific scam of the century.  The news breaks first as a tale of fear and pity. Doctors at a London hospital claim a link between autism and a vaccine given to millions of children: MMR. Young parents are terrified. Immunization rates slump. And as a worldwide ‘anti-vax’ movement kicks off, old diseases return to sicken and kill. But a veteran reporter...

In Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century (Columbia University Press, 2020), Thomas Doherty offers a lively and comprehensive cultural history of the media coverage of the abduction and its aftermath. Beginning with Lindbergh’s ascent to fame and proceeding through the trial and execution of the accused kidnapper, Doherty traces how newspapers, radio, and newsree...

In Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020), Dr. Kim Gallon examines how Black newspaper editors and journalists created and fostered Black sexual publics during the 1920s and 1930s. She demonstrates that editors strategically elected to publish stories about marital scandals, divorces, homosexuality, and gender non-con...

Sharon Marcus’s new book, The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton UP, 2020), sets out to help us understand celebrity culture and how it has shifted and evolved since its contemporary inception in the early 1800s. Marcus highlights the celebrity concept throughout western history, indicating some of the same dynamics at work in classical Greece that we see in our current popular culture landscape. This...

Bombastic headlines about science and technology are nothing new. To cut through the constant stream of information and misinformation on social media, or grab the attention of investors, or convince governments to take notice, strident headlines or bold claims seem necessary to give complex, nuanced information some wow factor. But hype has a dark side, too. It can mislead. It can distract. It ca...

Listen to this interview of Elisa De Ranieri, Editor-in-Chief of Nature Communications. We talk about knowing the research you have done, but communicating the message you want said. Interviewer: "When a submission lands on your desk, or better said, you call it up on your screen, what are you pleased to see, what makes your work easier?" Elisa De Ranieri: "Yeah, well, I guess what makes the job e...

Harvey Araton’s new book Our Last Season: A Writer, a Fan, a Friendship (Penguin, 2020), reads like a mix between Tuesdays with Morrie and a sequel to his book When the Garden was Eden (which chronicled the New York Knicks’ early-70s title teams). It’s a book about friendship, aging and of course, basketball. Harvey Araton is one of New York's--and the nation's--best-known sports journalists, havi...

Social media has become a crucial avenue for political discourse in Southeast Asia, given its potential as a “liberation technology” in both democratising and authoritarian states. Yet the growing decline in internet freedom and increasingly repressive and manipulative use of social media tools by governments means that social media is now an essential platform for control. “Disinformation” and “f...

While Hollywood’s images present a veneer of fantasy for some, the work to create such images is far from escapism. In Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood (Duke University Press, 2020), anthropologist Vanessa Díaz examines the raced and gendered hierarchies and inequalities that are imbricated within the work of producing celebrity in Los Angeles, CA. Díaz’s...

Surfers are the ultimate bad boys, living the counter-culture life of decadence and hedonism as they travel the world in search of the perfect wave, partying hard along the way. So, it’s not surprising that these social misfits and dropouts created a sub-culture tied to drugs. While most might associate surfing Jeff Spicoli with smoking marijuana in Fast Times at Ridgemont High or hippies dropping...

Michael Stamm’s book Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) begins with the simple but thought-provoking premise that, not too long ago, newspapers were almost exclusively physical objects made out of paper. This meant that producing a newspaper implied industrial production, mills, and a distribution system that could deliver daily...

"Few freedoms in the United States are as cherished as freedom of the press." So begins Chapter One of Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society (Oxford University Press, 2020). The book by Victor Pickard, Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the Annenberg School for Communication makes it clear, however, that mainstream American news media are not really...

Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) by Jerry Gershenhorn is a history of the struggle for Black equality in North Carolina from 1927 to 1971 as told through the life and activism of Black newspaperman Louis Austin. Austin, as editor of the Carolina Times, was involved in nearly every facet of the long Black freed...

Nature is the premier weekly journal of science, the journal where specialists go to read and publish primary research in their fields. But Nature is also a science magazine, a combination unusual in journal publishing because in an issue of Nature, research stands side by side with editorials, news and feature reporting, and opinion articles. In fact, over two-thirds of the pieces Nature publishe...

In his compelling evaluation of Cold War popular culture, Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines (Cambridge UP, 2020), Gregory Daddis explores how men's adventure magazines helped shape the attitudes of young, working-class Americans, the same men who fought and served in the long and bitter war in Vietnam. The 'macho pulps' - boasting titles like Man's Conquest, Battle...

Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (University of Pennsylvania Press) is a richly illustrated history of the American Anti-Slavery Society and its print, material, and visual artifacts. Beginning with its establishment in the early 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) recognized the need to reach and consolidate a diverse and increasingly segmented audie...